The Best and the Rest

By

David Littlejohn

Updated Oct. 27, 2010 12:01 a.m. ET

San Francisco

Paris's Gare d'Orsay, a long-disused Beaux Arts train station, was converted into a museum in 1986. Here the French government moved most of its prize holdings of French art created after Romanticism (where the Louvre's collection stops) and before Modernism (where the Centre Pompidou takes over). That left the Musée d'Orsay with the work of French artists between 1848 and 1914. To most of its three million visitors a year, this means Manet, the Impressionists (Monet, Renoir, Pissarro & Co.), plus the three great independents—Van Gogh, Cézanne and Gauguin. The museum's 6,000 works also include many artists before, after and contemporaneous with these famous names. But it is the Impressionists and the three post-Impressionists (especially Van Gogh)—the most familiar, easy-to-like serious painters in Western art—that the millions keep coming to see.

When it was decided three years ago that part of the interior was to be redesigned and rebuilt, Guy Cogeval, the museum's new director, picked out two batches of more than 220 works by 64 artists (each batch with "Impressionist" in its title) to rent out to other museums with the time, space and money to show them. He had so many major works left at home that most museum- goers in Paris would never know anything was missing. And these two traveling shows were guaranteed to earn his museum a great deal in rental fees.

So far, 847,000 people in Madrid and San Francisco have seen Part I, called "The Birth of Impressionism: Masterpieces From the Musée d'Orsay," which is currently at the Frist Center in Nashville. Part II—"Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne and Beyond: Post-Impressionist Masterpieces From the Musée d'Orsay"—broke national attendance records in both Canberra, Australia (476,000), and Tokyo (770,000) and is now at the de Young Museum here, whose director, John Buchanan, found time and space for both parts. In fact, eight months of back-to-back Musée d'Orsay shows at the de Young follow closely upon almost nine months of "King Tut II," which drew 826,000. Such high-priced, high-profit traveling blockbusters present few challenges to museum personnel other than installation design, publicity and crowd control, and few challenges to visitors except waiting in long lines and then trying to see favorite paintings over other people's heads.

The Birth Of Impressionism

Frist Center Nashville Through Jan. 23

Part I begins with sleek Salon nudes of the kind Manet and Monet were fighting against. Millet and Courbet add healthy doses of rural realism. I found the most impressive works in the pre- Manet rooms to be two naturalistic images of poor country peasants by Jean-François Raffaëlli and Jules Bastien-Lepage.

The iconic Manet here is "The Fifer," the boy musician in a red-trousered army uniform. Other Manets also assert his independence of academic norms: roughly painted "living" portraits of his friends; a small boat of escapees (1881) in a vast green ocean of paint; a sprawling, sensuous "Woman With Fans" (1873); "Moonlight Over the Port of Boulogne" (1869). Gustave Caillebotte's well-known painting of three shirtless workmen on their knees scraping down a hardwood floor (1875) is one of the great paintings in the show.

Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne and Beyond

de Young Fine Arts Museum San Francisco Through Jan. 18

Then suddenly the deep- colored walls sparkle with wavelets, leaves and spatterdash strokes, and everyone feels at home. Here are Monet, Renoir, Pissarro and Sisley. The prizes are Monet's "Gare St. Lazare" (1877), all smoke and steel, and his small "Rue Montorgeuil" (1878)—the painting Impressionism might have been invented for—with dozens of daubed-in tricoleurs flapping merrily out of windows, over hundreds of dots of people celebrating in the street.

Among the artists in the final gallery are Degas, with five good examples, and Cézanne (who really belongs in Part II). The five Cézannes include three—"The House of the Hanged Man" (1873), "Self-Portrait With Pink Background" (1875) and "The Bridge at Maincy" (1879)—of his most important works.

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The soul of Part II are the three galleries devoted to its titular deities, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Cézanne. I found only one painting of more than passing interest in the two rooms before them—Degas's magical "Dancers Climbing the Stairs" (1886-90). Seurat and the other pointillistes are weakly represented. If pressed for time (or by the crowds), wait until you can get close enough to drink your fill of the very best of the three kings. In the Van Gogh room, feast on his familiar, prickly self-portrait of 1887; the sad, bright image of his cramped room at Arles (1889); and "Starry Night" (1888), one of the unquestionable masterpieces in this show. Don't miss the four sexy images of women by Toulouse-Lautrec in a corner of the room.

It is hard to choose among the better works of Cézanne, but in this half of the exhibition I found myself returning to study and wonder at his portrait of the art critic Gustave Geffroy (1895-96); the most successful of the 26 paintings he made of "Bathers"—naked men full of life, in a brookside setting (1890); the prickly, near-erotic "Still Life With Onions" (1896-98); and a good example of the many paintings he made of Mont Sainte- Victoire (1890).

There are 10 paintings here by Gauguin, including a Cézannesque still-life, five works from Brittany, one from his troubling stay with Van Gogh at Arles in 1888, and three from his escape to Tahiti and nearby islands in 1891. Three of the Breton scenes leap out with their forceful, "wrong" colors, looming shapes, and flat, outlined peasant figures; "Les Alyscamps" (1888), an ancient burial ground outside of Arles, may be the best work he did while living with Van Gogh. But the three works from Tahiti are the strongest by far.

The last five of the 10 galleries are devoted to other artists in the decades before full-blown Modernism. These French painters—including Maurice Denis, with 10 works—seem to me overrepresented, and "masterpieces" are few. There was, in fact, a decline in French art, with artists experimenting in a number of dead-end directions, before Picasso, Braque and Matisse realized how best to carry on where Van Gogh, Cézanne and Gauguin had left off.

The two most memorable works in these galleries are a pair of Henri Rousseau's "Outsider Art" nightmares: "War" (1894), in which a little girl bearing a sword and torch rides an eyeless wild animal over a field of naked male bodies being picked at by crows; and "The Snake Charmer" (1907), an all-black Eve in a dense jungle who pulls black serpents out of the ground and trees with her fife.

Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard, the two conservative French painters of the turn of the century whose reputations have endured, are unusually represented, Bonnard best by two candidly erotic bedroom paintings and a large 1927 view from above of a Riviera town. The masterpiece here by Vuillard (Mr. Cogeval is the world expert on the artist) is an 1894 series of five painted panels, intended to decorate a Paris home, that depict daily life—and the cycle of life—in a French city park. Children play, mothers cajole, nannies chat, an old woman sits alone on a bench under her red parasol. The handsomely painted, tenderly colored landscape surrounding the actors continues from panel to panel.

But why not wait until 2011 and go to Paris to see all of these (and more, and better), back home at the reconfigured Musée d'Orsay, without the hype and hoopla that surround globe- traveling crowd magnets such as these?

Mr. Littlejohn writes for the Journal about West Coast cultural events.

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